


Strange Stars Amid the Gloam

by orphan_account



Category: WE Johns - Biggles series
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-18
Updated: 2009-12-18
Packaged: 2017-10-04 12:46:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,016
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30217
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Biggles is not the way Algy imagined him; not so tall, not so brash, not so masculine, and above all, not yet even quite an adult.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Strange Stars Amid the Gloam

**Author's Note:**

  * For [torakowalski](https://archiveofourown.org/users/torakowalski/gifts).



He had dreamed so often of this moment in the months that had preceded it: idle thoughts of sky-ships stealing his attention away from late-afternoon Euclid; more intricate fancies twisted into unlikely narratives after lights-out. He had dreamed of it, all of it: this place and this life; this windy, war torn countryside; this feeling of belonging above the earth, like a bird, with all the little soldiers snaking, antlike, through the trenches below.

Most of all, though, he had dreamed of Biggles.

In Algy's mind, he had always seemed…taller. This, ridiculous as it was, had been his most overwhelming thought upon their first meeting as warriors, as airmen, for there was nothing at all heroic about the slight, diminutive figure that greeted him - nothing even especially _adult_ about him, but for the fine lines graven about the soft mouth, and a certain something in the eyes.

Yes, there was something there. A sort of coiled knowledge that set this face apart from so many other faces of equivalent age, still gazing out over rugger fields and sixth-form classrooms, at home across the Channel. In another world. But still, he was rather small, rather delicate. In a school setting, Algy couldn't have imagined him achieving much of anything.

It didn't take him long to recognise the fallacies in such a supposition. He knew, under the damn-fool exterior, the veneer of naivete so practised as to seem natural almost to Algy himself, that Biggles was gauging him, judging him, wary and careful and full of a scepticism far beyond his years. It seemed to him that they accepted each other at much the same point in time: Biggles, because the fear of a jammed gun had failed to overwhelm Algy's feeling, gleaned from years of GA Henty and clumsy poetry, that a soldier's first duty was to follow his orders to the letter; and Algy, because Biggles had shown himself so frankly willing to change his mind. They hadn't become friends just then, not so easily, not with Mahoney always in the foreground of Biggles's mind, and Wilks more often at 266 than in his own mess, their affection for each other rapped out in crude remarks and extravagant bouts of teasing. Algy didn't feel able to do that, quite; to be that to Biggles, or for him, or with him. But that first exchange of respect between them had been the beginning of something, nevertheless.

Now, with his fingers soft on Biggles's face, he thought he knew what that something was. He had strange eyes, Biggles, gold and green and grey as the light dictated, and they held Algy's own now without any trace of that adult look he had noticed before, that cynical understanding. Now, they were only dark-wide-open, the soft light of the candle picking out amber and brass, honey and copper. His skin was very fine to the touch, running smooth under Algy's hand like fine-pilled velvet, downy and young in a way that Algy's own skin had not been for some years, now. Algy suspected that Biggles was no slave to the razor.

Algy said, "I'm sorry." He had said it many times already, since Biggles had stumbled home in the half-light, his face blackened with oil and grime and his heart blackened with grief. Algy had barely known Tom Ellis, but his legacy would live in his memory now in the fragments of this evening: the heavy tumbler shattering against the chimney piece, hurled in Biggles's first fit of rage, and the look on his face as he fell against Algy afterwards, after revenge had been dealt and the fury had given way to a blank numbness.

"They killed him," Biggles whispered. "They killed him. Tom."

"Yes," Algy soothed, stroking the fine fair hair back behind Biggles's ear: again, again. "You got the brute, though. That's something. Isn't it?"

"Something," Biggles said. "Not enough."

"It's never enough." His other hand came up to cup the jaw line, steadying, reassuring. "But it's all we can do. You couldn't have done more."

"No," Biggles responded, slowly, like a man half-sleeping. "No, I suppose not. I suppose not."

"It's all right," Algy said, nonsensically, untruthfully. "It's all right. It'll be all right. It's all right."

The words fell from his lips like some strange mantra, consoling, and his lips were still forming them even as he brushed them to Biggles's, pressing, gentling. Against him, Biggles made a soft, sharp sound that could have meant anything at all, and Algy parted his lips a little to swallow it, exhaling into soft warm darkness: _it's all right. It's all right._

It was irrational, this, detrimental, even; but they were young and at war and the world was skewed on its axis. Algy had never kissed like this, at school, in all his years of casual fumbling and pleasure ground crudely through his fingers, but this was not that, nor any relation to it. This was different, and Biggles seemed to know it, mouth parting damp and clinging under Algy's, fingers winding too tightly into his hair. Until this moment, as Algy pulled Biggles closer and into his arms, he had never quite registered that he was, himself, the larger of the two, a little taller, a little more solidly built. Biggles seemed to melt against him, and he was glad of it.

This was all it was: Biggles's soft boy's mouth under Algy's own, the fine lines at the corners of it slipping under Algy's lips; the slender weight of him in Algy's arms, and the shadow between them of all the other boys the earth had taken, uncoffined, unkissed. This was all it should have been: a comfort between men too young to so old as this, Biggles's fingers in Algy's hair and, when they parted, tears.

"It's all right," Algy said, pressing kisses to temple, cheek, chin. "It's all right. It'll be all right. We'll be all right."

_We'll be all right_.

They wouldn't, but Algy wanted to believe the lie, tonight. He cupped Biggles's jaw in his palms, and kissed him again.

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from Thomas Hardy's 'Drummer Hodge'. There are a couple more references to this poem in here as well, to be spotted by the sharp-eyed among you. :)


End file.
